The survey found that 62% of associations rely on email to market products and services. Only 27% use direct mail; and only 12% use telemarketing.

The survey also found that only 18% of associations use some additional channels to market products and services, including social media and face-to-face.

“Associations are oblivious to the massive shift in members' buying habits that's underway," David says.

"They're failing to use the many channels members use, and to understand how members move from one channel to another."

By favoring email over other marketing channels, David says, "Associations are plagued by low inbox rates, dismal email response, and over-digitalized members."

How can associations catch up?

Associations need to go all-in on multichannel to catch up with changes in members' buying habits, David says.

First, they need to recognize that the audiences for their goods and services have expanded. Businesses have become more collaborative in the past decade. Hierarchical structures and decision-making have given way to "flat" organizations that resemble networks. Multi-member buying teams, comprising a diversity of job functions and seniority levels, now make all the buying decisions. Often these teams are temporary. So, there's no longer a single point of contact, or a single demographic, you can target. The contacts are many, diverse, and temporary.

With an increase in decision-makers comes longer purchase cycles, greater scrutiny, and higher expectations. Your messages have to survive months for your offering to be considered.

Meanwhile the start-up sector is exploding, bringing another new mindset to B2B buying. Decisions are personal and decision-makers consider how purchases reflect on their brand and values.

And decision-makers are no longer largely Boomers. They aren't even Gen Xers. Your buyers are Millennials.

Next, associations have to learn how to speak to larger, more diverse audiences.

You need, among other things, to personalize messages for specific people in specific environments. You also need to reach them across multiple devices and channels. And, while B2B audiences seem to be "always on," there are in fact certain days, times and places where you can engage them more reliably. Pinning these down is important. You'll often find audiences checking the daily news on their phones first thing mornings; viewing personal and lifestyle content on a desktop over their lunch breaks; and eyeballing social media accounts on a tablet or laptop during he evenings.

Lastly, associations have to discover content marketing.

More precisely, they have to learn what content works, and what content doesn't.

Traditional association marketing content is long, dry, and product-focused. But because decision-making has expanded and audiences grown more diverse, traditional content could well be backfiring.

A mix of non-traditional content makes better sense. Blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos, webinars and short-form content (such as direct mail and social media postcards) can be much more engaging and accessible, especially at the early stages of the buying cycle. You can use these formats to provide insights and trends instead of nitty-gritty details; and do so in a more digestible, friendly, and entertaining way. By being a little less talkative, serious, and self-absorbed, and a little more humane, you can cut through the clutter of sales messages that are engulfing today's super-busy buyers.

Total online giving grew by 14% since 2015, with email generating 26 cents of every dollar.

Email lists grew by 10%; email volume, by 10% as well. The average subscriber received 69 email messages in 2016.

Email metrics flagged, however. Open rates dropped by 7%, to just under 15%.

Response rates dropped by 8%, to just .05%. A nonprofit had to land 2,000 fundraising emails in inboxes in order to generate a single donation.

"The truth is that technology, tastes, and audiences change, and change is not uniform," the report concludes.

"For many nonprofits, online programs are relatively mature. They’re essential, and still growing, but perhaps aren’t seeing the dramatic advances they once did. These nonprofits might increasingly turn to new platforms and nuanced strategies—like digital advertising and website optimization—to make the most of their online programs.

“You can’t keep playing the same old tunes if you want to stay at the top of the charts."

Best of all, PLAYBOOK provides trade show organizers additional revenue.

Here's how it works:

Step 1: LIST BUILDING & BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

We clean and standardize show management’s attendee registration list, appending business intelligence to every record (data like company size, credit score, technology spend, SIC, etc.).

Step 2: PRE-SHOW POSTCARD

We send a customized, jumbo, pre-show postcard to all prospects selected by the exhibitor. The postcard drives traffic to the exhibitor's booth by offering attendees the chance to play a cool trivia game and win prizes.

Step 3: PRE-SHOW EMAILS

We send three, customized, pre-show emails to every prospect. Each seeks to drive appointments and traffic to the booth.

Step 4: PRE-SHOW TELEMARKETING

We complete outbound, pre-show in-person telephone calls with every prospect. The calls are used to collect additional business intelligence, pre-qualify visitors and set in-booth appointments, if desired. We also provide weekly progress reports, so the exhibitor can predict the campaign's likely outcome and plan for booth staffing.

Step 5: ONSITE ENGAGEMENT & LEAD CAPTURE

Attendees download our trivia game app to play and win. All trivia questions reinforce the exhibitor's brand or product message. Booth staff act as game hosts, driving face-to-face interaction with all attendees, and game scores are displayed on a real-time leaderboard in the booth. The trivia game app integrates with your show app, and with all lead retrieval systems.

Step 6: POST-SHOW TELEMARKETING

Within five days, we make post-show telephone calls to all leads captured during the show. We capture additional business intelligence, including product interest, purchase intent, purchase authority, purchase committee members’ names and titles, budget, timeframe, marketing content needs and preferences for follow-up. Leads are divided into three sets, based on lead-time to purchase and further divided into three categories, Hot, Warm and Cold. Leads are streamed to the exhibitor weekly for analysis, assignment and follow-up. All data can be easily uploaded into a CRM.

Call 202 641.5131 to learn more about PLAYBOOK or to request a brochure. Learn how your can produce better return for your exhibitors, and put extra money in your coffers.

With membership and dues revenue dwindling by the day, why do most association executives accept lackluster results from non-dues revenue-generation programs?

Writing for Associations Now, Katie Bascuas says it's in large part because association execs worry about loss of non-profit status. They worry that straying afield of the association's mission might bring down the wrath of the IRS.

But that worry's misplaced, as case studies prove. It hasn't deterred:

AARP, which hawks health, life and auto insurance plans, and now runs a full-service marketing agency, Influent50.

American Nurses Association, which runs a lucrative medical publishing operation.

PMMI, which recently purchased a trade publishing house and now produces magazines and journals for the packaging industry.

Career centers and licensing programs are some of the other non-dues-generation activities associations are embracing, Bascuas says.

But the challenge association execs face is "convincing staff and leadership to try a new approach."

Association execs do themselves no favor when they neglect to discuss non-dues revenue with their boards.

Are you peddling all the time? Try educating and entertaining more often. Like 80% of the time.

Wrong product

Are you romancing someone who's just not that into you (or who once was, but is no longer)? Try personalizing your messages (not just inserting "Dear Andy," but pairing prospect with product).

Wrong cadence

Are you sending too many emails? Overkill is Reason Number 2 prospects unsubscribe, says CIO Magazine. You can double your leads by sending no more often than once every two weeks.

Wrong prospect

Reason Number 1 prospects unsubscribe? They never subscribed in the first place (or forget they did). Communicate your opt-in and name-use policies clearly. And shun "web scrapers" offering rented names. We can help with that. Contact us at info.me@bobanddavidjames.com.

Does it have lots of abandoned or dormant addresses? Purchased addresses? Fake addresses? Mistyped addresses? Malicious addresses? Or "spam-trap" addresses?

Does your audience engage with your messages? Do you have acceptable open and click-through rates? Or does your audience ignore your messages, because they have lost interest in you or think your messages are spam-like?

Does a large portion of your audience complain about your emails? Have opt-outs and suppressions been removed from your list?

Like needing a tetanus shot, if you can't remember the last time your list was fixed, you need to fix it .

Warm your IP

If you send a ton of emails every month (millions). you may want to begin to send them from a dedicated―versus a shared―IP address.

If so, you should first try a little "IP warming," says IBM's David Fisher.

IP warming―dribbling, instead of blasting, emails three times a week from your IP address over a six-week period―earns ISPs' trust, Fisher says.

Successful IP warming still demands a clean list, Fisher says.

And don't try to fake out the ISPs.

If you successfully warm them to your IP address by using only engaged recipients, then add lots of unresponsive or suspect addresses, you'll find yourself blocked.

"It’s ideal to be transparent with the data you’re using from the outset, so you can confront issues and respond to them early in the process rather than have it hit you later, perhaps during a peak trading period," Fisher says.